Will EA sell me Need for Speed Underground 2? Nope! They won't even acknowledge it exists on their website:
https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed
Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu. It's not even there in the sense of "we're proud of our heritage, look at a history of our old games."
I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. I bought the 4K remaster of Lawrence of Arabia for $5 on the Apple TV Store recently, and that's a very fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.
I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:
If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work, or is no longer for sale in a manner reasonably consistent with its original form of sale (e.g., they used to sell Need for Speed Underground 2 as a one-time purchase but now it's only available as a subscription, or the price has been changed from $50 to $3,000), people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work. The redistributor would also not be allowed to represent themselves as the rights-holder or do anything that would confuse people into thinking they were the original source of the work.
[–] vel0city 13 hours ago
So I can go to the store and buy any of these? No? Huh. Sounds like this is largely untrue for most films ever produced commercially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...
[–] boston_clone 3 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_St...
[–] vel0city 1 hour ago
But sure, let's go to more modern examples. Are all of these easily acquired "new" these days?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...
[–] frmersdog 10 hours ago